Damian Barr: my miserable Christmas

The Now That’s What I Call Music XIII double-cassette album, my mum and dad to get back together and me not to turn out gay after all. That’s all I want for Christmas in 1988. It doesn’t seem too much to ask. I am 12 and a half and live in small-town Scotland — my parents have been divorced for long enough now that I’m starting to think they mean it. They’ve both got somebody else. Mum’s got Baldy Dodger. Dad’s shacked up with Mary the Canary in our old house. Me and my wee sister Teenie hate them both: Dodger’s always drunk and everybody says Mary is a ‘hoor’, Mum calls her ‘a Poundshop Dolly Parton’. Teenie’s at that age where she believes everything I tell her and everybody’s always saying how clever I am, so I tell her I’m sure they’ll get back together one day. I tell myself the same.

Everybody at school thinks divorce is brilliant: two lots of presents. It’s not. What you really get is half a Christmas. We’ll spend the morning with my mum trying not to look too excited about going to Dad’s — he’s got a good job in the steelworks, which could mean a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48k computer. My mum still can’t work, still isn’t right after her brain haemorrhage. She forgets things then forgets she forgets. I try remembering for her. Disability benefits don’t stretch much beyond a selection box and bits we need wrapped up as stuff we want: school shirts, gym shoes (Gola not Nike). ‘It’s the thought that counts,’ she says. Last year we got some books from Social Services. That was mortifying.

Number 15 Rannoch Avenue, Newarthill, has three bedrooms. ‘Our own back and front door,’ my mum nearly kissed the man from the council when he gave her the keys. It was built for miners when the mines were still open. I’ve got the big quiet room at the back to myself so I can do my homework. I try not to think about Mum and Dodger through the wall. Teenie shares the wee room with our cousins Shawn, Tricia and Aidan. Downstairs on the couch snores their dad, our Uncle Joe. They’re all here because Auntie Cat ‘took a wee bad turn’ and we’re not to mention her and that’s that. Flying about freely is my cockatiel Pertwee named for my favourite Doctor Who. She sleeps, fluffed up on one foot, on the curtain pole in my room.

In this house every morning is chaos, but Christmas is madness. I stay in bed reading Carrie until Teenie bursts in around 11am telling me somebody’s emptied my selection box. She doesn’t know it was me, that I filleted my favourites. Rudely awoken, Pertwee shrieks out into the hall, flying downstairs. She’s taken to nibbling bits off the Christmas tree and I worry the plastic is poisonous. I get up and follow her down, trailing Teenie.

The living-room carpet, which we’re still paying off, is covered in wrapping paper. Cliff Richard is whining about ‘Mistletoe and Wine’ at full volume on the telly and everybody’s shouting. Pertwee is quietly pecking the wings off the fairy on the tree. Dodger and my uncle are drunk already, not cheerfully tipsy like the funny uncles in BBC sitcoms but pissed. This is good. Hopefully they’ll have conked out by the time we’re back from Dad’s.

On cue at noon, there’s a beep-beep as he pulls up in the red Ford Sierra Cosworth my mum worries is too fast. I haven’t unwrapped my presents but I know what I’ve got — a calculator for maths. I’ll open it later. Teenie has been dressed and ready to go since dawn. I throw on some clothes and my mum has a go at brushing my Jason Donovan curtains out of my eyes and we walk — don’t run because that would be hurtful — out to Dad. She waves us away, front door closed behind her to keep up appearances.

Dad is six foot everything and seems taller at Christmas. He has coal-black hair and a Magnum PI moustache and he can whistle. We whoosh down the road to the house that was ours but is now his. His and Mary’s. She’s waiting for us, a hair-sprayed lipsticked sentry. No hullo. ‘Look what yer Daddy got me,’ she says. A ring glints on her finger. I decide not to tell Mum.

Here it’s quiet and clean and I should be happy. But all I can see is the Christmas tree in the wrong place and where are the decorations I made when I was wee? Teenie limpets herself on to her daddy. Mary stands jealously in her helter-skelter heels then rushes us through a lunch of dry turkey, made drier by a microwave, toy carrots and shrivelled peas. Teenie gets a rocking horse instead of a real one. I open my Big Present and there is a ZX Spectrum 48k. Carefully sliding the box from its sleeve, me and my dad spend a blissful hour with cables and cassettes tuning into the future. ‘Time to go,’ says Mary at around 4pm, the ring on her finger flashes as she waves us off.

Pulling up at 15 Rannoch Avenue, Teenie is bawling. Dad’s hands grip the steering wheel. He looks straight ahead. I prise her out and he speeds off. We’re walking up the path when the front door bursts open. ‘Ye forgot yer present!’ Mum shouts, swaying tipsily. Somebody’s opened it already. Cassettes rattle promisingly in their double case. I recognise the cover from the advert. How did she know about Now XIII? How could she afford it? Behind her the front door is wide open and I can hear them all fighting and shouting, and before I can warn her, out swoops Pertwee. Up and away she flies. And I want to follow her.

A few years later I do. I fly away to university in Lancaster and that first snowy term I sledge into my future husband. I never go ‘home’ for Christmas again. Instead, we make a new home. My parents are still not back together (their partners are, mercifully, long gone). And I turned out gay after all. I still have that Now album somewhere and whenever I hear ‘The Only Way is Up’ by Yazz I feel grateful that I didn’t get everything I wanted for Christmas in 1988.